1GB P2P file transfer coming to Facebook through Pipe

Large file transfer may soon be coming to a Facebook near you. Everything to everyone—Facebook covers gaming, news, chat and now an expanded file transfer beyond the size allowed by message attachments. The new feature is credited to a new app called Pipe, unveiled at the London Web Summit.

Pipe will be going into beta come Monday, and will allow chunks of data, up to 1GB in size, to be transferred from peer-to-peer on the social network. Berlin-based Pipe uses Adobe’s Real Time Media Protocol Flow to slip the file into the recepient’s cache– no Facebook or Pipe server space gets occupied. The Adobe tech was designed for Flash or AIR apps to communicated with each other.

“We’re starting on Facebook because it gives us viral reach,” Pipe CEO Simon Hossell told GigaOM. “When the user wants to send a file to a friend, the friend gets a Facebook chat message with a link to the app and an explainer video; they install the app to get the file… and so it spreads.”

Facebook is the first stop for the app, but an iOS version as well as an idea for an Android version are ready to spring after Pipe takes off.

The app launch comes at the heels of the recent Facebook acquisition of Caffeinated Mind. The acqui-hire shows that the social network is laying some pipe of its own for an official file transfer set-up. The three person team of Caffeinated mind is behind Sendroid, which helps transfer files for users in-browser, as well as Expresso, which focuses on data transfer on the enterprise level. CMI said in a blog post last month that they intended to “change the way files moved online,” and they may get that chance once Facebook starts allowing it’s almost 1 billion users to transfer music selections and other big pieces of data from friend-to-friend.